The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Persea Books)

The voices that fill Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s collection of poems are ghosts with histories, with memories, with otherworldly longings. But their stories, rooted in the everyday, never near the highfalutin. Our narrators are teachers, miners, teenagers, street fighters, husbands and wives. Their environment is rural, but their blue-collar values transcend any regional biases. These are poems that eschew their insights with reserve and honesty, charged with the charm of the Everyman. They are big-hearted poems, clever and well-plotted; poems that concern themselves with the particulars of the universal, and do so with vigor and conviction. —Andrew Pogany